This workshop will offer concepts and demonstrations which will help therapists best pay attention to the transition points between now and next. A continuing sense of "sequential rightness" may sweep patients into open mindedness and to an increased range of otherwise inhibited therapeutic options.
The workshop will center on a role-played demonstration of family therapy using members of the audience. There will be an enactment of the telephone plea from the new patient to the therapist. Included will be structuring the blind date appointment between the two paranoids when the therapist is one of them. History taking and the war for the family "I" position will be demonstrated. Also discussed will be expanding the anxiety and establishing the generation gap.
Clinical Demonstration 11 from the Evolution of Psychotherapy 1995 - Humanization of Technique, featuring Erving Polster, PhD.
Educational Objectives:
To describe and illustrate the difference between ordinary human engagement in therapy and technical engagement.
To describe a moment when you could discern a felt meeting of minds between patient and therapist.
Methods for training therapists customarily are directed to developing cognitive abilities. Using Milton Erickson as a model, an alternate, experiential approach is offered. The "evoking style" of the therapist determines the outcome of the treatment more than the theoretical and clinical methods to which the therapist ascribes.
For the past half-century there has been a remarkable and continual evolution in the theory and practice of psychotherapy. Now that evolution shows signs of becoming a revolution. Many elements of these changes are, as yet, only scantily represented in the literature, but they are the stuff of bull sessions, the more liberated case conferences and solitary, sometimes fearful, experimentations. This transition comes about from a variety of influences, among which three are particularly worthy of examination for what they suggest about what is likely to emerge a half-century from now.
The traditional assumption that only insight into the causes in the past can bring about a change in the present makes us blind for what Alexander & French called "the corrective emotional experience," i.e., chance events in the present that may lead to almost immediate solutions. A great number of Erickson's surprising results could be considered the outcome of "planned chance events," often in the form of behavior prescriptions similar to interventions in hypnotherapy (e.g., "speaking the clients's language," prescribing resistance, the use of reframing, paradoxical interventions, etc.).
Supervision and therapy are isomorphic processes. What supervision teaches is the process of creating change in people, and the very teaching of this process is itself an attempt to create change in the supervisee. Like families, therapists tend to confine themselves to selected segments of their possible repertory. Thus a major goal of supervision can be the expansion of the therapist's use of self.
As human beings age, we are bombarded with losses: of our professions, businesses or jobs; homes; health; ideals; friends; family members and partners. This address will offer special techniques, usable in brief or long-term therapy, to help aging clients find ways to honor their losses as well as their own integrity, as they continue to grow and to savor life.